[Ubuntu-US-CA] Internet slowdown

Sat Jun 25 03:51:06 UTC 2016

Thanks to everyone who replied to this thread.  I am going to be going back
to the homeless shelter soon, and I will update everyone after following
the suggestions given in this thread.  Thanks!

On Fri, Jun 24, 2016 at 8:31 PM, Mark Weisler <mark at weisler-saratoga-ca.us>
wrote:

> Hi Christian,
> I'm intentionally top posting...
>
> As a general practice, you want to engage in "bracketing" to try to
> isolate your networking problem.
> You know that you have a problem all the way out at the end computer in
> the lobby.
>
> Now you want to take a notebook computer to the "first place" you have an
> internet  connection at the site.  This is probably at the broadband modem
> or as close to the demarcation point as possible. Assuming you have an
> ethernet cable connecting from the broadband router to your switch, take a
> "known good" ethernet jumper cable and plug one end into the broadband
> modem (or dsl modem) and the other into your notebook. Test the internet
> connection from there. If bad or flaky or slow you then know to call the
> ISP.  (Probably after rebooting all the electronics and testing again.)
>
> If good, then disconnect your notebook and connect the broadband modem to
> the switch. Pick a suitable port on the "LAN side" of the switch and test
> again. If good you probably know the switch is good. Perform another test
> on the port serving the lobby of the establishment to learn if maybe that
> particular port is bad but others are good. It sometimes happens that a
> port on the "LAN side" of the switch is bad, maybe just one out of N ports,
> and you can just plug the lobby line into a different (good) port.
>
> If the port serving the lobby has been good and tests good then you know
> you probably have a problem with the cabling between the switch and the
> lobby "technology outlet". And so on. Bracketing your testing to isolate
> what is good and what is not. There are, of course ways to use electronics
> to test and measure the quality of the ethernet cables installed in the
> building. It can sometimes be good to have all this testing and documented
> as a baseline for your records but maybe that's not affordable in this
> situation.
>
> Hope that helps.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Jun 24, 2016, at 12:20 PM, Christian Einfeldt wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> Here are my questions:
>
>    1. Why did my speed tests fail in this situation?
>    2. Are the ping speeds normal for this situation?
>    3. What diagnostic tests can I run to isolate the slowness on this
>    system?
>
> As most people on this list know, Partimus is volunteering for a low
> income housing shelter in here in SF.  I have put in some quality legacy
> Lubuntu machines in the lobby for the residents to use.  These machines all
> have Intel Core 2 duo chips with 2 GB of RAM and are running Lubuntu
> 14.04.  I use a similar machine at home, and have no problems with it.
> This email is being written on such a machine at one of the other
> two homeless shelters.  The residents routinely use these machines to watch
> YouTube video and use LibreOffice, etc., all without issue.  The machines
> are proven good.
>
> This is the third shelter to which we have given machines.  They don't
> have a budget for either the equipment or the tech support for these
> machines.
>
> Two of the three shelters have good speed on the Internet that goes to
> the machines.  (The shelters provide the Internet service).
>
> However, the third shelter, called the Mentone, has slow Internet speeds in
> the lobby.  I am not able to even do anything as basic as run sudo apt-get
> update, as the machine chokes on downloading the updates.
>
> The wiring is put in place by a company I will call the Maintenance Group
> (MG).  I have called both the MG and the ISP.  Both of them claim that they
> have no problems.  The ISP says that they are providing the usual 2 Mbit /
> second that we expect here in the US for a configuration like this.  The MG
> says that they have run a test on the wiring from the server to the lobby,
> and are not seeing any problems.
>
> The ISP is a good company that does not hate GNU-Linux.
>
> The ISP asked me to give them a speed test directly from the switch,
> which is located in the basement.  So I ran speed tests in the basement
> and in the lobby, and was unable to get the speed test to work.  Speed test
> has worked on this machine before.  Here are the two results:
>
> Lobby, where the Lubuntu machine is to be located:
>
> cje at cje-ultralap440:~$ speedtest-cli
> Retrieving speedtest.net configuration...
> Could not retrieve speedtest.net configuration: timed out
> cje at cje-ultralap440:~$ ifconfig
> eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 20:1a:06:04:64:42
>          inet addr:172.16.2.121
>
> basement, directly from the switch:
>
> cje at cje-ultralap440:~$ speedtest-cli
> Retrieving speedtest.net configuration...
> Could not retrieve speedtest.net configuration: timed out
> cje at cje-ultralap440:~$
>
> *My first question:  *I am not sure why this speed test failed.  Does
> anyone know?
>
> Since I couldn't run speedtest, I pinged google instead.  Here are the
> results from the lobby:
>
> cje at cje-ultralap440:~$ ping www.google.com
> PING www.google.com (216.58.192.4) 56(84) bytes of data.
> 64 bytes from nuq04s29-in-f4.1e100.net (216.58.192.4): icmp_seq=1 ttl=52
> time=8.24 ms
> 64 bytes from nuq04s29-in-f4.1e100.net (216.58.192.4): icmp_seq=2 ttl=52
> time=7.31 ms
> <snip>
>
> --- www.google.com ping statistics ---
> 16 packets transmitted, 12 received, 25% packet loss, time 15037ms
>
> rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 6.962/7.497/8.198/0.366 ms
>
> Here is the test from the basement:
>
> cje at cje-ultralap440:~$ ping www.google.com
> PING www.google.com (216.58.192.4) 56(84) bytes of data.
> 64 bytes from nuq04s29-in-f4.1e100.net (216.58.192.4): icmp_seq=1 ttl=52
> time=8.24 ms
> 64 bytes from nuq04s29-in-f4.1e100.net (216.58.192.4): icmp_seq=2 ttl=52
> time=7.31 ms
> <snip>
> --- www.google.com ping statistics ---
> 11 packets transmitted, 11 received, 0% packet loss, time 10015ms
> rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 7.022/7.816/8.519/0.451 ms
> cje at cje-ultralap440:~$
>
> *My second question*: Are these ping speeds normal?
>
> My third question: What can I do to find the problem with the system?
>
> Thanks!
>
> --
> Christian Einfeldt
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-- 
Christian Einfeldt
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